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The Night the IETF Shut Off IPv4

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fun-with-switches dept.

IP Freely writes "At this year's Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Philadelphia, conference organizers shut off IPv4 for an hour. Surprisingly, chaos did not ensue. 'After everyone got his or her system up and running, many people started looking for IPv6-reachable web sites, reporting those over Jabber instant messaging — which posed its own challenges in the IPv6 department. I was surprised at the number of sites and wide range of content available over IPv6. Apart from — obviously — IPv6-related sites; they ranged from "the largest Gregorian music collection in Internet" to "hardcore torrents." Virtually none of the better known web destinations were reachable over IPv6. That changed when ipv6.google.com popped into existence.'"

6 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. yo by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The trouble with ipv6 is that ipv4 works so well for 90% of the population (in the same manner that 76% of statistics are made up on the spot) that nobody who doesn't really care about this won't put in an effort to make the switch. It looks like going 100% ipv6 is quite a few years off, foo.

    1. Re:yo by Loke+the+Dog · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, IPv4 is ultimately the reason why people have NATs, and from my experience, most people with a NAT do occtionally run into problems. But these people could never guess that their problems are caused by the NAT and could be solved by simply getting more IPs.

      For this reason, you rarely see people picking ISPs that offer more IPs and that means IPv6 comes along slowly. From the ISPs point of veiw, supply of IPs is greater than demand.

      Its like people who use a terrible OS (and I'm not even talking Vista here, but more like win 98 or something) and get viruses and all sorts of malware. They don't seem to understand that all those issues they're having with their computer is not something you have to put up with, that there is a solution. This makes demand for really good OSes relatively low.

  2. How Many of the Attendees Weren't Engineers? by andrewd18 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What I really want to know is, how many of the people who had computers at that conference were users who had no clue what IPv6 even was, much less how to configure their computer to use it.

    It's one thing to say IPv6 is ready because a conference filled with engineers could download their pron with IPv4 turned off. It's entirely another thing to say that IPv6 is ready because it works without my mother even knowing the difference.

  3. Re:Slashdot outgeeked by google by SomeGuyTyping · · Score: 2, Insightful

    did you think of trying ipv6.slashdot.org instead of ipv6.slashdot,org?

    --
    My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
  4. Re:that's nothing! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Recently, I turned off IPv6 on all my FreeBSD servers. NOBODY NOTICED! Duh. You weren't serving hardcore torrents .
  5. Re:Great, so it works ... now what? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or you can just bite the bullet and put in the hours, acknowledging that it won't lead to extra revenue but is necessary for the internet to continue.